Ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture have been set by both national governments and their respective livestock sectors. We hypothesize that farmer self-identity influences their assessment of climate change and their willingness to implement measures which address the issue. Perceptions of climate change were determined from 286 beef/sheep farmers and evaluated using principal component analysis. The analysis elicits two components which evaluate identity, and two components which evaluate behavioral capacity to adopt mitigation and adaptation measures. Subsequent Cluster (...) Analyses reveal four farmer types based on the PCA scores. ‘The Productivist’ and ‘The Countryside Steward’ portray low levels of awareness of climate change, but differ in their motivation to adopt pro-environmental behavior. Conversely, both ‘The Environmentalist’ and ‘The Dejected’ score higher in their awareness of the issue. In addition, ‘The Dejected’ holds a high sense of perceived risk; however, their awareness is not conflated with an explicit understanding of agricultural GHG sources. With the exception of ‘The Environmentalist’, there is an evident disconnect between perceptions of agricultural emission sources and their contribution towards GHG emissions amongst all types. If such linkages are not conceptualized, it is unlikely that behavioral capacities will be realized. Effective communication channels which encourage action should target farmers based on the groupings depicted. Therefore, understanding farmer types through the constructs used in this study can facilitate effective and tailored policy development and implementation. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s sustained reflection on Greek thought has been increasingly recognized as a decisive feature of his own philosophical development. At the same time, this important philosophical meeting has generated considerable controversy and disagreement concerning the radical originality of Heidegger’s view of the Greeks and their place in his groundbreaking thinking. In Heidegger and the Greeks, an international group of distinguished philosophers sheds light on the issues raised by Heidegger’s encounter and engagement with the Greeks. The careful and nuanced essays (...) brought together here shed light on how core philosophical concepts such as phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, and ethics are understood today. For readers at all levels, this volume is an invitation to continue the important dialogue with Greek thinking that was started and stimulated by Heidegger. Contributors are Claudia Baracchi, Walter A. Brogan, Günter Figal, Gregory Fried, Francisco J. Gonzalez, Drew A. Hyland, John Panteleimon Manoussakis, William J. Richardson, John Sallis, Dennis J. Schmidt, and Peter Warnek. (shrink)

The authors argue that the time is ripe for national and corporate leaders to move consciously towards the development of global ethics. This papers presents a model of global ethics, a rationale for the development of global ethics, and the implications of the model for research and practice.

To paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from his Through the Looking Glass, “The time has come to talk of many things.” Not as the Walrus did in the nursery rhyme, “of sho...

The opening sentence of Christopher Meyers’ Target Article is “Lying to one’s patient is wrong”. The author continues, “This truism is one that bioethicists have heartedly endorsed fo...

Dostoevsky wrote that love in action is a harsh and terrible thing compared to love in dreams. That reality is particularly evident in medicine, where there is an almost universal, involuntary participation of physicians and other healthcare workers in the suffering of their patients. This paper explores this phenomenon through the paradigm of ‘mystery’ as explained by the French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel. A mystery is different from a problem in the sense that the former requires the active immersion of (...) the person involved in order to be truly experienced. It is a ‘meta-problem’ that cannot be analyzed objectively and separately from the person that it affects, without changing the nature of the thing experienced. The authors contend that the human suffering encountered in medicine is one such phenomenon, and the paper draws on illustrations of this concept in art and literature. Awareness of the subtle but important difference between mystery and problem may help physicians better understand their personal entanglement with the suffering of patients. (shrink)

This book collects essays considering the full range of Robert Sokolowski's philosophical works: his vew of philosophy; his phenomenology of language and his account of the relation between language and being; his phenomenology of moral action; and his phenomenological theology of disclosure.

There have been periodic claims that evolutionary biology needs urgent reform, and this article tries to account for the volume and persistence of this discontent. It is argued that a few inescapable properties of the field make it prone to criticisms of predictable kinds, whether or not the criticisms have any merit. For example, the variety of living things and the complexity of evolution make it easy to generate data that seem revolutionary, and lead to disappointment with existing explanatory frameworks. (...) It is then argued that special discontent stems from misunderstandings and dislike of one well-known but atypical research programme: the study of adaptive function, in the tradition of behavioural ecology. To achieve its goals, this research needs distinct tools, often including imaginary agency, and a partial description of the evolutionary process. This invites mistaken charges of narrowness and oversimplification, and these chime with anxieties about human agency and overall purpose. The article ends by discussing several ways in which calls to reform evolutionary biology actively hinder progress in the field. (shrink)

In the last two decades, interest in narrative conceptions of identity has grown exponentially, though there is little agreement about what a "life-narrative" might be. In connecting Kierkegaard with virtue ethics, several scholars have recently argued that narrative models of selves and MacIntyre's concept of the unity of a life help make sense of Kierkegaard's existential stages and, in particular, explain the transition from "aesthetic" to "ethical" modes of life. But others have recently raised difficult questions both for these readings (...) of Kierkegaard and for narrative accounts of identity that draw on the work of MacIntyre in general. While some of these objections concern a strong kind of unity or "wholeheartedness" among an agent's long-term goals or cares, the fundamental objection raised by critics is that personal identity cannot _be_ a narrative, since stories are artifacts made by persons. In this book, Davenport defends the narrative approach to practical identity and autonomy in general, and to Kierkegaard's stages in particular. (shrink)

This volume examines the psychological basis of moral judgments and what theories of concepts apply to moral ones. It considers what mental states not only influence but also constitute our moral concepts and judgments by combining philosophical reasoning and empirical insights from the fields of moral psychology, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience. On this basis, Park proposes a novel pluralistic theory of moral concepts which includes three different cognitive structures and emotions. Thus, our moral judgments are a hybrid that (...) express both cognitive and conative states. -/- In part through analysis of new empirical data on moral semantic intuitions, gathered via cross-cultural experimental research, Park draws on this to reveal that the referents of individuals’ moral judgments and concepts vary across time, contexts, and groups. Due to this, he contends for moral relativism, where moral judgments cannot be universally true across time and location but only relative to groups. -/- This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in cognitive science, moral theory, philosophy of psychology, and moral psychology more broadly. Those interested in ethics, applied social psychology, and moral development will also benefit from the volume. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of popular American writers, American philosophers, and Continental thinkers, this book provides a new interpretation of pragmatism and American philosophy.

John J. McDermott's anthology, _The Philosophy of John Dewey_, provides the best general selection available of the writings of America's most distinguished philosopher and social critic. This comprehensive collection, ideal for use in the classroom and indispensable for anyone interested in the wide scope of Dewey's thought and works, affords great insight into his role in the history of ideas and the basic integrity of his philosophy. This edition combines in one book the two volumes previously published separately. (...) Volume 1, "The Structure of Experience," contains essays on metaphysics, the logic of inquiry, the problem of knowledge, and value theory. In volume 2, "The Lived Experience," Dewey's writings on pedagogy, ethics, the aesthetics of the "live creature," politics, and the philosophy of culture are presented. McDermott has prefaced each essay with a helpful explanatory note and has written an excellent general introduction to the anthology. (shrink)

The key to understanding self-identity is identifying the transcendental structures that make a temporally extended, continuous, and unified experiential life possible. Self-identity is rooted in the formal, temporalizing structure of intentional experience that underlies psychological continuity. Personal identity, by contrast, is rooted in the content of the particular flow of experience, in particular and primarily, in the convictions adopted passively or actively in reflection by a self-identical subject in the light of her social and traditional inheritances. Secondarily, a person’s identity (...) is rooted in others’ characterizations of that person in the light of the social conventions and constructs of the cultures and traditions that have shaped the personal identity of the ones who make the attributions. Personal identity, on this view, is fundamentally rooted in beliefs, traits—especially character traits—sentiments, and moods, that is, in the subject’s convictions about the true, the good, and the right—and in the commitments to the pursuit of (apparently) worthwhile goods and to the practical identities rooted in those convictions. (shrink)

Interest in thought experiments (TEs) derives from the paradox: “How can findings that carry conviction result from a new experiment conducted entirely within the head?” Historical studies have established the importance of TEs in science but have proposed disparate hypotheses concerning the source of knowledge in TEs, ranging from empiricist to rationalist accounts. This article analyzes TEs in think‐aloud protocols of scientifically trained experts to examine more fine‐grained information about their use. Some TEs appear powerful enough to discredit an existing (...) theory—a disconfirmatory purpose. In addition, confirmatory and generative purposes were identified for other TEs. One can also use details in transcript data, including imagery reports and gestures, to provide evidence for a central role played by imagistic simulations in many TEs, and to suggest that these simulations can generate new knowledge using several sources, including the “extended application” of perceptual motor schemas, implicit prior knowledge, and spatial reasoning operations, in contrast to formal arguments. These sources suggest what it means for TEs to be grounded in embodied processes that can begin to explain the paradox above. This leads to a rationalistic view of TEs as using productive internal reasoning, but the view also acknowledges the historical role that experience with the world can play in forming certain schemas used in TEs. Understanding such processes could help provide a foundation for developing a larger model of scientific investigation processes grounded on imagistic simulation (Clement, 2008). (shrink)

Your Deepest Ground invites readers to take a deep dive into their personal, archetypal, and universal ground, and to see through the false ground of their early conditioning and limited identity. Using authentic anecdotes and conversations drawn from his teaching, and accompanied by refined sensing and inquiry practices, Prendergast guides the reader in a unique groundbreaking and ground-opening exploration.

A significant effect of China’s rejection of a planned economy for a free market is the stimulus this has given to discussion of therelationship between morality and the market. Some Chinese believe that the introduction of a market economy has had a negative effect on public morality. Others disagree and maintain that it has had only a positive effect. Besides this particular debate there are two others. In the first of these debates, it is maintained on the one side that (...) conduct in the market is amoral and essentially contractual or transactional in nature: a boundary must be drawn between economic conduct and conduct in other spheres of social life. Against this it is argued that ethical norms apply equally to all aspects of social life including the economy. In the second debate one side holds that the market engenders its own “ethical” norms. In opposition it is argued that the moral categories articulated in moral philosophy are applicable to behaviour in the market. (shrink)